RollupAs noted above, three new and powerful stages were added to 8.5 just after it shipped. These stages have been included in the Fix Pack to streamline applying these features into your environment. These stages are

XML StageI wrote about this new stage in a prior blog entitled Scalable and Intuitive XML. As a summary, if you are looking to find a way to process and scale out multi-gigabyte, complex XML, this is a technology you should look at.CDC Transaction StageProvides a very active design, metadata and runtime integration of InfoSphere Change Data Capture
with the ETL capabilities of DataStage. This functionality allows the replicated database log information to be directly piped into a running DataStage job in order to support complex transformation and heterogeous targets. This also includes novel 'bookmarking' technology to provide guarenteed delivery of the information throughout the solution. You can find more informaiton in the InfoCenter.DRS ConnectorAdvances the mature 'Dynamic RDBMS' concept to the newer Connector framework. Allows parameterization of the source/target database type fully so that jobs can be written once and run against multiple DBMS types (DB2, Oracle, ODBC).

New FeaturesI seem to be building this blog in sets of three, so in staying with that form, here are a few of the new features packaged into DataStage as part of FP1:

NEW - Job Log Detail Window in DesignerThe Director's Log Detail window has been integrated into Designer (see picture to right). With this enhancement, users can access the full set of job runtime information directly alongside their job design, thus simplifying the development lifecycle. You will also note that additional job control buttons (job stop/job reset) are provided in the log toolbar.

NEW - Bloom Filter StageThe Bloom Filter stage is based on the algorithm developed by Burton Howard Bloom and provides highly performant and resource efficient duplicate key filtering. This is particularly useful in Telco data integration patterns involving the enormous volumes of call detail records.

NEW - Environment Variable Import/Export FeaturesThe
DataStage Administrator includes two new buttons that control the export
and import of environment variables. These files can be shared between
projects in the same Information Server instance or across mulitple instances as you
may require in promoting from dev to test to prod. This feature ensures that
customizations made to one project's runtime environment can be applied
consistantly across your enterprise.

Follow-up

If you'd like more information on Information Server 8.5 or specifically about Fix Pack 1 feel free to drop me a note at tcurcio@us.ibm.com.